The brand emptied the final contents of its Cadillac House in the upscale SoHo neighborhood in Manhattan for good and is shipping them to Michigan now, Cadillac President Steve Carlisle said this week.

"We moved out of New York last week and everything is on the road and the people are in transition too," Carlisle said. "Some of the people are here and some are working out of our remote offices in New York."

The gallery in Cadillac House, a showroom that touts the brand and its cars while also serving as a public space for events, concerts and collaborative partnerships, will remain open until the end of May, Carlisle said. Then it also will be vacated.

"We just have so much product on the way," said Carlisle, explaining the rationale for the return to Michigan. "We want to be closer to our designers and engineers. Also, with Cadillac taking the lead in electric vehicles, a lot of that was hard to do from long distance."

Separately, Cadillac said that as it rolls out the new XT6 midsized SUV to dealerships later this year, it will be the first Cadillac to debut a new torque-based badging system that will distinguish for customers the power differences across the lineup.

New digs

Cadillac will be launching a new or redesigned vehicle every six months through 2021, so it had to be closer to the engineers and designers in Warren, Mich. Carlisle said about 50 Cadillac employees from New York are moving to Michigan and that move will be complete by April 1, when the luxury brand will hold a ribbon-cutting at its facility in Warren.

General Motors' luxury brand announced it would move back to Michigan in September 2018. In addition to the 50 people moving, 60 more who are part of Cadillac didn't go to New York when brand headquarters moved in the fall of 2015.

In January, GM said Cadillac will lead all brands in developing and launching electric cars. At that time, Cadillac showed a photo of what the brand's first electric vehicle will look like, though it did not say when it would come to market, its name, where it will be built or other details.

Carlisle said to expect that car to market sometime in 2022.

The vehicle will be the first off a future platform GM is developing for EVs that will accommodate all-wheel, front- and rear-wheel drive vehicles across the automaker's four brands.

GM has been working to build that platform since April 2018 at its design center in Warren, said Carlisle.

New badging

"Taking the lead in innovation and technology will make Cadillac Cadillac again," GM CEO Mary Barra told reporters at the Detroit auto show, where the EV was shown along with Cadillac's new three-row SUV, the XT6.

Cadillac XT6 arrives in dealerships later this year. It will start at $53,690 for the premium luxury front-wheel drive model. The XT6 lineup also includes the XT6 Sport, with standard Sport Control all-wheel drive, which starts at $58,090.

The SUV will also be the first to have new torque-based badging.

Carlisle said the badges will showcase "the balance between fuel economy and performance."

As turbocharged engines and electrification technologies become more prevalent, torque is a better representation of available power than the current system that uses displacement, Carlisle said.

The new system uses a three-digit badge representative of torque output in newton meters (Nm) rounded to the nearest 50. Carlisle said Cadillac chose newton meters rather than the more common U.S. measurement of pound-feet because Cadillac is a global brand and more of the world is on the metric system.